What are the themes of Dutch painting in the seventeenth century

17th-century Dutch painting Night Watch

In the 16th century, the people of the Netherlands rebelled against Spanish rule, and after decades of revolution, in 1581 the northern provinces declared independence and formed the United Provinces of the Netherlands. In 1609, Spain signed a 12-year armistice with the Netherlands, effectively recognizing the independence of the Netherlands, while southern Flanders remained under Spanish rule. In this way, after the 17th century, Dutch art was divided into two, and the art of the northern region formed an independent Dutch national art, which parted ways with the Flemish art of the south.

The most striking thing in Dutch art is painting, followed by architecture, and sculpture is at the bottom. And in terms of painting, the Dutch school of the 17th century is particularly important. Although there were some schools and painters worth mentioning in other periods, it was only in the 17th century that the Dutch School as a whole had a profound impact on the development of Western art with its huge scale and achievements.

The 17th century was the first era of Dutch painting. The victory of the revolution led to economic and cultural prosperity. This emerging country was one of the centers of advanced thought in Europe at the time.

Dutch painters had a sense of national pride. Use realistic techniques to express the life of the people and natural scenery of the motherland in his works. Painting finally broke free from its attachment to the court aristocracy and the Catholic Church and began to serve the emerging burgher class.

With the advent of the painting market and art dealers, painting became a commodity in the market. In order to meet the daily and aesthetic needs of the public, the variety of paintings has been greatly expanded compared with the past. In addition to religious history paintings and portraits, genre, landscape, still life, and animal paintings also developed into important genres.

The most important Dutch painters of the 17th century were Rembrandt, FHals, JVermeer and Resdal.

At that time, the art of painting was well developed in most cities in the Netherlands, with Amsterdam, Haarlem and Delft being the most developed. However, in the case of the schools, the differences between regions are not as pronounced as the differences between varieties. In addition to the four painters mentioned above, there are many painters with different artistic achievements in different genres, who are known as the Dutch Little School.

Genre Painting The Dutch genre painting of the 17th century did not reflect real life through religious themes as the Renaissance painters, but directly and faithfully reflected the daily life of the citizens and peasants in a non-idealized way.

This genre painting generally includes two types of content: peasant themes and so-called fashion themes that reflect the lives of citizens.

In the Netherlands, there are Rembrandt, Hoch, Vermeer. In Spain, there are Rivera, Francisco Suburán.

Court culture.

Although in the 17th century, the Netherlands completely freed itself from the Catholic Church and Spanish rule, and became the first commercial capitalist country in human history. However, after the establishment of the Dutch Republic, feudal land ownership was not abolished, and there were still traces of monarchy in politics. Influenced by this, although the civic culture was greatly developed during this period, the mainstream painting art still mainly reflected the life of the upper elite, and the most representative painter of this era, Rembrandt, many of his paintings depicted the life of the elite in the nascent Dutch Republic.

The answer is civic culture, thank you.